Sami Khatib (FU Berlin): ‘The Messianic and the Archive: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Politics of Time’’

Starting with Giorgio Agamben’s (2006) distinction between messianic time (Judeo-Christian monotheism) and eschatological end-time visions (Mysticism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism), my paper examines the temporal structure of Benjamin’s messianic Marxism. As is well known, Benjamin’s notion of ‘now-time’ [Jetztzeit] introduces a theologico-political temporality different from scientific-philosophical concepts such as absolute Newtonian, relativist Aristotelian, or transcendental Kantian time. But how are we to conceive of the specificity of this messianic time?

Benjamin’s version of the ‘messianic idea in Judaism’ has to be differentiated from other influential understandings of the messianic such as an impotent ‘life lived in deferment’ (Gershom Scholem) or a ‘waiting without horizon of expectation’ (Jacques Derrida) as well as from contemporary radical leftist concepts which de-temporalize history (Alain Badiou’s ‘Event’). Rather, for Benjamin the messianic works in two opposite directions: it indicates the ultimately achieved interruption/cessation of history by virtue of ‘political action [which], however destructive, reveals itself as messianic;’ and it maintains a never irrevocably accomplished historical happening which can be retroactively changed by the experience of remembrance [Eingedenken].

According to this reading, messianic politics (the ‘real’ state of exception) and messianic historiography (retroactive redemption of the past) involuntarily coincide at the point of the ‘now of recognisability’ which irreducibly links political acting, temporality and epistemology. For Benjamin, an authentic revolutionary act does not merely open a ‘hole in time’ (Paul Celan) but introduces an inner loop of time, a ‘time differential’, a time of an epistemologico-political operation unearthing a hidden potentiality of the past. Following Agamben, we might call this time the ‘time of the end’ – ‘the time that time takes to come to an end’ – in contrast to the eschatological ‘end of time’.

The operational time which is encapsulated in the ‘now of recognisability’ allows for an alternative position between the contemplative-idealist standpoint of official historiography, which collects historical events/facts/texts, and the meta-historicist stance of a Foucauldian Archeology of Knowledge. Benjamin’s concept of history is neither about archived history in the positivist sense nor about Foucault’s idea of a ‘general system of the formation and transformation of statements.’ Following Agamben’s instructive differentiation between the archive and the ‘testimony’, I finally argue that the messianic introduces a pure potentiality of the unwritten/unsaid which precedes the archival ‘system of relations between the unsaid and the said’. In other words: the Benjaminian ‘time of truth’ as the ‘now of recognisability’ concerns the past in its unarchivability – it does not designate the factual positivity of the relations of the historically enunciated but accounts for the structural condition of the (im)possibility of a true historical enunciation.